It sounds like a riddle: What happens when a Trappist monk, an actress who witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and an international peace activist gather in a room together?

The answer: an engrossing series of talks and workshops that, through the lens of the late pacifist monk Thomas Merton, aims to unravel one of the most riveting mysteries of our era: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its enduring meaning in our lives.

Jim Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters — a book Oliver Stone calls “the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance” — is in Vancouver to speak not just about the assassination that took Kennedy’s life nearly 50 years ago, but about the profound spiritual lessons at the heart of that event, which are still very much alive.

Saturday evening, Nina Rhodes-Hughes will direct a staged reading of Noah’s Ark, a play by Pittsburgh playwright Ginny Cunningham that is based on Douglass’s book.

Rhodes-Hughes, a former democratic activist and actress who now lives on Bowen Island, was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Her eyewitness report contradicts the official version of events.

The workshops with Douglass and the play reading with Rhodes-Hughes, sponsored by the Thomas Merton Society of Canada, provide an opportunity, says Douglass, to explore the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as calls for peace and, ultimately, hope.

Douglass knew Merton, a monk and fellow pacifist whom he compares to Gandhi. Merton died in 1968, possibly by accidental electrocution, while attending an interfaith conference in Thailand, but he left a profound impression through his many writings.

“Merton is the lens through which I view the events I examine in the book,” said Douglass. “The title of my book is JFK and the Unspeakable; Merton wrote a book called Raids on the Unspeakable. The Unspeakable he was talking about was a kind of systemic evil we are in denial about that includes events like the Holocaust, the Vietnam War in its depth and breadth, as well as the assassinations that took place in the ’60s.”

The Unspeakable, he explains, is “a void,” “a personal and communal denial of what is actually happening,” “the dark abyss,” “a kind of systemic evil.”

Kennedy was trapped in this void of the systemic “unspeakable,” but had begun breaking away after a deep personal transformation that led to a turning toward peace, said Douglass.

“When you get to the question of the JFK assassination and deal with records that have been revealed (in recent years) you see connections so profound, that go so high, that Merton’s term the unspeakable becomes applicable.”

How Kennedy would function as a leader was a question Merton raised in a 1962 letter to philanthropist W.H. Ferry. He wrote that leaders like Kennedy needed more than “shrewdness or craft,” they needed depth, humanity and a “deeper kind of dedication ... Maybe Kennedy will break through into that by miracle, but such people are before long marked out for assassination,” he wrote with remarkable prescience.

Kennedy experienced such a miracle, said Douglass, one that turned him toward a vision of peace. Kennedy had become disillusioned with the institutions that were enmeshed with his government, especially the CIA and the military industrial complex. It was a conversion that pulled the world back from the brink of nuclear war, but made him a “marked man,” said Douglass.

“That is the whole story that I have to tell. The extraordinary change that happened to Kennedy, what he experienced through the Cuban Missile Crisis until his death 13 months later ... he turned toward his enemy Nikita Kruschev, and together they turned toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis at the expense of political priorities on each side. He became closer to his enemy than to his own advisers.”

Unknown until years later, Kennedy and Kruschev, ideological enemies, had been secretly corresponding, nudging each other toward peace.

In a 1961 letter hidden inside a newspaper and smuggled into Kennedy’s hands, Kruschev used Noah’s Ark as a symbol: “Let’s not try to distinguish who are the clean and unclean on this Ark Mr. President. We’re in a sea of nuclear weapons. Let’s just keep the Ark afloat.”

They were enemies, but more profound than that was their shared humanity.

Eventually Kennedy resisted pressure from his military advisers to mount a nuclear attack on Cuba. Kennedy’s turn toward peace marked him for death, believes Douglass, but he stands as a symbol of hope, one we desperately need.

Turning toward peace is both a personal and communal responsibility, says Douglass.

“Why he died and why it matters ... the unspeakable is an obscure kind of thing that always seems to appear. The Cold War goes away when the Berlin Wall goes down, then something else appears. It’s been going on since the beginning of history. Kennedy broke through by a miracle, from the void to acceptance and responsibility.”

Personal responsibility and action is a required of all of us in an increasingly global society, says Douglass.

“We must turn our questions in the direction of what is happening to our brothers and sisters and ask questions of a profound nature that extend from us to Afghanistan, or Iraq, or south of the border to Latin and Central and South America, or to Asia; if we open our eyes, all sorts of things become connected.”

7 p.m., Canadian Memorial Centre for Peace, 1825 West 16th Ave. By donation.

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How the assassinations of peaceful leaders like JFK and MLK translate into hope

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